Tight Quarters
by Cornerboothtales
Summary: A party of adventurers are caught in a deadly ambush underground. The first part of what will eventually be a series of shorts. First story, please read and review!


_A Fight in Tight Quarters_

The first sign of ambush came in the form of arrows whistling down the corridor. Dag brought his shield up just in time to catch two shafts that thudded into the leather-fronted wood hard enough to send him staggering a step back. Even before the last round from the opening volley landed, Bram leapt into action, snapping out orders with speed and clarity born of long practice.

"Dag, you and me up front, shields up; Holm, back us up – take my halberd." Holm grunted his accent and grabbed the weapon off Bram's back, forming up behind Bram and Dag as they took position in front, doing their best to block the hallway with their shields.

With a roar, a dark group of enemies – more Kryll, Dag thought – jumped out from hiding at the other end of the passage and charged right at the party of adventurers.

As more arrows hissed in, Bram kept issuing orders. "Iacus – give us some protection from those arrows. Vess, pick off whatever you can hit. Arnkel…" he looked around, but the sixth member of the party had already vanished, melting away into the shadows "…do whatever it is you do…"

Iacus said three words that crackled in the air and with a dull _whoomp_ a sphere of translucent blue energy snapped into place about the party. A second volley of arrows rebounded harmlessly off the sphere, moving too swiftly to penetrate. Vess raised her bow and placed an arrow on the string, drew it back and released, angling a shot over the shield bearers in front. Iacus' warding field was polarized, meaning that while projectiles fired at it from the outside would bounce harmlessly off, arrows and bolts launched from inside could make it through with all their deadly energy intact. Vess' first shot arced down the hallway and hit the Kryll Blade that was leading the charging pack squarely in the throat, dropping him at once. The Curs behind him stumbled over the body and slowed and, with the party in formation, Bram barked "Advance!"

They moved off down the corridor at a steady pace, Bram and Dag in front, Holm directly behind them holding Bram's polearm high and ready to strike over the shields, then Iacus holding his glowing staff aloft, keeping the warding field moving with them, and in the rear, Vess, steadily loosing shafts into the advancing Kryll.

In the seconds before the two groups collided, Dag, facing down the pack of bloodthirsty monsters, wondered what his old mother would think of him now. That he was doing something stupid and dangerous, better off left to wiser heads, most likely.

Then the first rank of Kryll hit.

They were moving slowly enough that they had no problem penetrating the field, and so they charged right through it and into Bram and Dag's raised shields. The trick to holding a shield wall, Dag had learned early on, was to brace the shoulder of your shield arm and the forearm of your weapon-bearing arm against the shield and to push back against the enemy as hard as you could. If you held, you won, if you broke or even faltered, you lost. The first Kryll hit Dag's shield like a boulder rolling downhill in a rockslide; if Bram hadn't noticed him recoil and slowed his own pace, Dag would have fallen behind him, leaving Bram's side open to attack. That was what you did in a shield wall, you had to be as aware of your fellows as you were of your enemy. Dag could hear the Kryll scrabbling around and hammering blows against his shield, and he swung blindly over the top of it with his axe, trying to hit whatever he could, but the blow didn't connect. "Holm!" he yelled as he strained against the thin buffer that was all that was keeping him from a most untimely end.

The big borderer heard him and responded instantly, as was his job in the formation. With a whistle and _crack_, he hammered the blade of the halberd against the Cur's torso. The enemy stumbled and Dag, sensing his weakness, bulled forward, knocking him over. At the same moment Bram hissed two words sibilant words that Dag felt more than heard – as much sense as that made. The Kryll he was opposing staggered back yowling, hands clenched over its eyes, smoke or steam snaking from between its fingers, and Bram struck from behind his shield, his mace crushing through the enemy's armor and shattering its chest, killing it. There was a sharp _thock_ and the Kryll in front of Dag went down, an arrow sticking out of its eye socket.

Holm bellowed his peculiar high-pitched warcry and swung the halberd again, almost completely severing a Blade's arm in the process and the catching a Cur in the hollow of the throat with the weapon's back-hook on the upswing. Bram stabbed at an enemy who cam leaping at him in an attempt to get over his shield, catching him squarely in the mouth with the wicked spike fixed to the top of his mace. Dag swung his axe, felt it connect with something that gave – flesh – and then he had to brace the shield with his axe-hand as a flurry of blows pounded against it. Holm stabbed downwards with the halberd and knocked a Cur back, giving Dag a brief respite. Still bracing against the blows, he swung low with his axe, below his shield, and caught the Kryll warrior across its legs, knocking it against the corridor wall. He pushed past the wounded enemy yelling "Holm, passing on the left!" Behind him there was a sickening crunch as Holm slammed his armored gauntlet against the Cur's face as he passed, the spikes welded to his armor crushing the creature's skull against the wall with ease.

It was no use, however; there were just too many Kryll, and they threw their combined might against the shields, forcing the defenders back apace. _This is _it, Dag thought to himself, _I'll never be getting home to the green fields and dear old mater. I knew going down into this dark hole was a mistake!_ He briefly thought about turning and running, escaping with his life while the others faced the tide of foes. He imagined himself running free on the surface, grieving for the friends he had left behind, a coward but alive. He only briefly entertained the idea, though, and not seriously. _We Hasbacks are made of sterner stuff than that_, he remembered his pater saying, and it gave him a small glow of satisfaction, despite his impending doom, that the old gaffer had been right. _Might as well give these demons what-for_, he thought to himself, _not long now, we can't hold against this press! _

Bram must have realized that as well, because quite suddenly he bawled out above the din of battle "Arnkel's taken care of those archers!" – Dag couldn't tell what he meant by that, he couldn't see past the press of slathering, monstrous faces before him – "Iacus, loosen up this blockage for us!"

If the old elf responded, Dag didn't hear him, but suddenly the warding field dissipated with a sharp snap and Iacus was stepping up, his staff held low, saying something an a strange, booming voice that was so deep that Dag couldn't make out any of the words clearly. He thrust his staff between the two shields, dodging a blow from a Cur's sword as he did so, and tapped the suddenly glowing tip of it against the stone floor. There was a great rush of what seemed like air that thrust Kryll aside to the left and right, all the way down the hall, and with it a great dull noise that hammered in Dag's inner ear like the beat of a kettle drum.

The press of Kryll suddenly lessened and the creatures reeled back, many of them staggering as if in a stupor. "Burn through 'em!" Bram shouted. "Dag, Vess deal with any stragglers. Holm; take point!"

"Aye!" Holm, looking as close to happy as he ever did, thrust the halberd into Iacus' hands and reached over his shoulder to draw his greatsword, crying "Gimme some room, lads, and I'll go to work!"

And go to work he did, as the two shield-bearers stepped aside, rushing into the lurching ranks of the enemy and laying about him with the massive blade like a glittering steel dervish. Bram sprinted to follow, swinging his mace, and quite suddenly Vess was alongside Dag, firing a last shot from her bow – the arrow skipped off the stone wall and buried itself in the ear of the last Kryll archer who had been hiding behind a pillar, readying a shaft of its own – and then unslinging her longaxe and diving into the fray with a Ranger battle cry.

There was what seemed to Dag to be a long time – although it could only have been a minute or two – of hacking, slashing and thrusting, filled with disjointed images that he knew would stick with him for many years – a Blade, both its arms lopped off below the elbows by a single sweep of Holm's blade, staggering drunkenly about, still trying to attack its foes with its fangs as blood spurted everywhere; Bram repeated hammering his mace into the head of a particularly stubborn Cur that refused to die, until its entire face collapsed inwards in a welter of blood and teeth, breath still somehow bubbling out of its throat; two Kryll that Iacus set blazing with green fire that went staggering back, shrieking wildly, into their fellows, setting some of them alight too; Vess sinking her axe into the stomach of a Cur and then disemboweling with an expert flick of her wrists, her face set in the way she did when she was trying not to think about what she was doing; a badly injured Kryll lying on the floor who looked up at Dag with perfectly calm, aware eyes as Dag brought his axe down on its head.

And then it was over, quite suddenly, and Dag stood, chest heaving, surrounded by dead enemies, astounded to find that was unharmed save for a scratch from a Kryll knife across his forearm. Holm stood in the doorway of the cavern beyond the end of the hallway, cleaning his sword blade with a rag and shaking his head, muttering "I got a fair few of 'em, with help, but _damn_, lad."

More to keep his mind off what had just happened, Dag pushed past him to see what he was looking at. Entering the room, he understood what Bram had meant when he'd said Arnkel had taken care of the enemy archers. It looked as if a fanged whirlwind had swept through the room, leaving more than a dozen dead Kryll, mostly armed with bows, dead on the floor, dark blood seeping into the cracks between the flagstones. Arnkel, incongruous in his peculiar armor, stood in the midst of them, examining a chain of some shiny metal that he had taken from one of the corpses. The tough, chitinous plates of his suit showed not a trace of blood, and nor did the blade of the long, delicately engraved knife from the tip of which the chain was suspended.

"We should not linger here for long," Arnkel said, his voice droning through his helmet's mouthpiece "Where you find but a few of these foul things you will often find many more lurking nearby."

"I'd hate to see what your definition of 'many more' is if this is just 'a few'," Bram said, lowering himself to sit on a fallen column in the corner of the room.

Dag moved farther into the room, doing his best to avoid looking at the corpses littering the floor like so much fallen chaff. He looked up at the ceiling where a solitary beam of pale sunlight somehow had found its way down from the surface far above and fell down into the room below. This was the part he hated, the aftermath of a battle. He could take the fear and horror in the midst of the fighting, bury it down deep and let adrenalin and logic and even the queer sensation that he had come to realize was a sense of adventure overwhelm it, but afterwards he always had a need to go off by himself to some quiet corner and sort himself out. Dag truly was a kind creature at heart, and even though he knew that the Kryll would gladly have slain him – slowly, if possible – and mutilated his corpse and slain and mutilated his friends, he still couldn't help but pity the creatures, particularly the one's he'd had slain.

_Pull yourself together, lad_, he thought to himself, doing his best to imagine that it was the stern, no-nonsense voice of his gaffer talking to him. _You did what you had to to keep your friends and you alive. It's part of the job, and if you didn't have the right stuff to handle it, you wouldn't have lasted this long._

A soft touch on his elbow brought him back to the present. Vess stood by his side, a worried frown creasing her brows. "Are you alright?"

Dag looked at her, at the concern in her eyes, concern for him, not for herself, and remembered that he hadn't lasted this long in the job because he had the right stuff to handle it, but because they, the five dysfunctional, mismatched members of the party, did have the right stuff, together. _With me_, he thought to himself in a rare moment of clarity unclouded by self-doubt. _The five of them and me. We fit together like a puzzle, all disjointed and irregular, but we make a whole, the six of us. We support each other, we complete each other._

Strangely he found himself grinning, with a weird, euphoric thrill, glad to be alive, glad to be part of a group that needed each other and depended on each other.

Vess looked at him oddly, and then smiled herself, glad that he was glad. "We should let Bram look at that," she said, motioning to the dripping cut on his arm.

"We should," Dag said, still dazed at the rush of emotions running through him.

"I'll be alright, though," he said as Vess took his arm and started leading him towards where Bram was already healing a gash that Holm had received. "I'll be alright."


End file.
